Six Ways To Make Your Content More Engaging
Content marketing is growing at an incredible rate and making your content stand out from the crowd is getting harder by the day. With brands and marketers across the world upping their game and investing more time and energy into creating awesome content, it’s no surprise that a vast amount of it can get lost in the noise.
Making your content more engaging is a necessity. Not only that, brands need to really connect with their audiences and make the experience a lot more personal. Brands such as Red Bull and Old Spice (Remember the interactive Mr Wolfdog piece?) are continually creating some of the most impressive content around, and with the impressive budgets they have at their disposal. However, what happens if you have a much smaller budget? Not every digital agency or brand has the budget to create a series of interactive infographics or incredible video content.
This is where you’ll need to get creative. Don’t panic though, it’s far easier than you think. Here are a few of our tips to ensure you’re making your content as engaging as possible.
1. Be as visual as possible
Adding images and videos to your articles can prove to be key in increasing engagement with your content. According to a recent Hubspot post, blog posts featuring videos often attract three times more links than plain text posts so why not give it a bash. You don’t need to blow all of your budget on creating amazing videos, try content curation on your articles instead. For example, think “Top Digital Marketing Videos of 2014”, add some videos and write about why they’re so great, or maybe add a particular video to illustrate a point that you’re speaking about.
Images go along way too. You may read the title of what looks like a great article, only to open it and be greeted with a wall of text. Use images to show examples of what you’re talking about and to break up the text.
Use images and videos across your social channels as well. At Parallax, our client Town Centre Car Parks see on average a 50% increase in engagement when using images and videos in comparison to text updates or links.
2. Talk like a human
Speaking like a robot or a marketing brochure is a sure-fire way to get people to avoid your brand. Obviously it depends on your audience, but try to be a bit more personal with how you write your content and communicate with the audience. Don’t write your blogs like a 3000 word essay that you’ve been forced to write as part of a university assignment. Be more outgoing, as if you’re offering valuable insights and advice.
The same goes with social media interaction – speak like you want to be spoken to. You’ll find that your audience is far more receptive and most importantly of all, they won’t feel like they’re being sold to.
3. Connect with your audience
Content marketing is about more than just pushing great content out to your audience. Whilst this is still important, it can become quite tedious to your followers. Why not invite them to be a part of the conversation. Invite customers to review your products, contribute to your blog, or post articles that require a response from your audience.
This goes without saying, but social share buttons need to be visible and easy to use. If you connect with your audience the right way, you could spark a conversation across your social channels.
4. Don’t ignore people
It’s no secret that people like to feel involved. Always encourage your users to respond by asking open-ended questions within your content, it’s an easy way to interact with your audience. What you may find is that they want to ask you questions in return. Don’t ignore people, make sure that you respond to their feedback.
5. Use multiple channels to your advantage
This one may seem simple, but distributing your content across a variety of channels is essential. If you’ve spent a while creating an amazing article stuffed full of insights and examples, don’t let it sit on your blog gathering dust. Share it across Twitter and Facebook, or stick some clear CTAs in one of your email newsletters.
6. No selling!
This is the most important point to take on board – people don’t want to be sold to. Every day people are harassed by advertising across TV, the internet, and of course their mobile devices. Focus less on selling to people, and more about becoming a thought leader and conversation starter. If you’re influencing your particular industry in the right way, your followers are more likely to buy into your business. If your brand is good and you’re offering great products, it’ll become easy to create interesting content, and with that content you’ll start to see that ROI you’re looking for.
How have you been creating content? What steps do you take when you’re planning? Get in touch, we’d love to hear some of your thoughts.